Privacy advocates in the Pacific Northwest are squaring off with local police over plans to install a system that would link surveillance camera video with databases containing photographs of hundreds of thousands of area residents.

In Seattle, Washington, the City Council will soon decide on
whether or not they should approve an ordinance that green-lights a $1.6 million
federal grant, a large chunk of which will be used to purchase
sophisticated facial recognition software that supporters of the
measure say would help stop crime.

Those Department of Homeland Security dollars would let the
Seattle police pay for software that digitally scans surveillance
camera footage and then tries to match images of the individuals
caught on tape with any one of the 350,000-or-so people who have
been photographed previously by King County, Washington law
enforcement.

“An officer has to reasonably believe that a person has been
involved in a crime or committed a crime” before they begin
to use the program, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best
told KIRO-TV this week

Once the facial recognition software is initiated, though, it
scours a collection containing close to a half-a-million area
residents — including many who may never have been convicted of a
crime.

That database, members of the local Seattle
Privacy anti-surveillance collective say, is composed of more
than just the mug shots of convicted criminals. Images of anyone
ever arrested and booked are included in that system, regardless
of whether or not they were ever ultimately convicted of a crime.
And according to a recent post on
the Seattle Privacy website attributed to founding member Jan
Bultmann, there has already been mention of perhaps someday
including the driver’s license photos of the millions of adults
across Washington state into that same system.

As currently proposed, though, “It would be a great way to
expedite some searching we’re already doing,” Assistant
Chief Best said of the plans during a City Council committee
meeting earlier this month, the Seattle CrossCut reported. “This only allows us to do it
much more quickly and much more efficiently, with a little bit
more efficacy.”

On Wednesday this week, the City Council’s Public Safety, Civil
Rights and Technology Committee met to discuss whether or not it should
approve that DHS Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant in
the amount of $1,645,955, and in turn purchase that “booking
photo comparison software” and also amend the Seattle Police
Department manual to include a section on properly using the
product. The full council is now expected to vote on the measure
early next month, but in the meantime privacy advocates are
asking the city to consider the possible implications of moving
forward.

Of particular concern, Seattle Privacy says, is the city’s rather
sordid past with regards to not just surveillance, but police
misconduct. The Seattle PD has previously used DHS money to fund
spy projects later canned over public outcry, and a federal
investigation concluded by the United States Department of
Justice in 2012 found that local officers acted in an
“unconstitutional and excessive manner” during nearly 20
percent of all instances involving the use of force.

But nearly two years later, the city is again being blasted by
civil rights advocates for allegedly being in violation of
another constitutional guarantee — the Fourth Amendment’s right
to be free from unlawful searches. Although the Seattle PD has
promised it won’t use its booking photo comparison software to
track suspects on-the-fly if the project has moved forward,
opponents fear residents will be worried over the possibility of
24/7 monitoring to enough of a degree that will impact how people
associate and assemble in public.

The Booking Photo Comparison Software, Seattle resident Phil
Mocek argued at Wednesday’s meeting, “may be used to target
activists and do real-time ID of people on the street,”
according to a tweet by Seattle Privacy founding member Lee
Colleton. And while the Seattle PD’s draft manual for using that
system currently includes provisions preventing a link-up with
live camera feeds, it does not include any measures saying how
long police might wait to watch a recording, be it five seconds,
five minutes or five hours.

"facial recognition photo booking system may be used to target
activists and do realtime ID of people on the street" @pmocek@SeattleCouncil

Once that data is recorded, Public Safety Committee Chair Bruce
Harrell told KIRO-TV this week, Seattle law enforcement
may elect to share it elsewhere.

“There may be times when the federal government may want to
look at that database that may be very appropriate if we have an
international terrorist here that might have committed a
misdemeanor,” he said.

With the Seattle PD draft rules currently mandating a 42 month
retention period, any activity captured if and when the system is
approved — even a misdemeanor — can be used by city and federal
authorities alike to look for persons of interest
three-and-a-half-years down the road.

Despite the possible Orwellian outcome, though, opponents of the
measure fear city officials aren’t adequately considering the
potential consequences. One witness to Wednesday’s meeting
remarked that none of the four testifying experts were privacy
advocates, but rather came from either the Seattle PD or DHS,
with the exception of a lone Seattle Human Rights Commission
representative.

“We need to get some independent technical expertise outside
of SPD chain of command to audit this equipment,” Seattle
Privacy’s Bultmann opined. Her group has since stated on their website that they will be marking up
the draft document themselves “to give councilmembers an
example of what a through independent technical review with an
eye toward privacy and security would look like, and how useful
it would be.”

@sleepylemur@bruceharrell We need to
get some independent technical expertise outside of SPD chain
of command to audit this equipment

Should Bultmann succeed, then the surveillance program may in
fact meet its maker before ever getting off the ground. Strangely
enough, it wouldn’t be the first spy program to be stopped in its
tracks lately in Seattle. In November the city was forced to
deactivate a wireless mesh network system
installed in secret across Seattle after privacy advocates
exposed how it could be used to track the locations
of anyone with a mobile phone in real-time. And among similar
outcry, the Seattle PD last February said they wouldn’t proceed with plans to start using
surveillance drones across the city.

"DHS has spent billions in black surveillance budgets that
brought us drones and cameras we're not even using,”
Bultmann said during Wednesday’s meeting.

"Drones give law enforcement agencies unprecedented abilities
to engage in surveillance and intrude on people's privacy,"
Doug Honig, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of
Washington, said in an email to Reuters when the police pulled the plug on
the plan earlier in February.

According to the ACLU, however, the facial recognition system
being requested by the Seattle PD doesn’t raise any red flags as
of right now. ACLU of Washington privacy counsel Doug Klunder
told CrossCut recently that the police actually
approached his civil rights group while drafting procedures for
the surveillance system, and he thinks “This policy does a
good job of limiting [the software] to proper uses.”

Two states away, however, the ACLU of California is asking city
officials in Oakland, CA to reconsider an eerily similar surveillance
system being planned there with federal funds. The City Council
there voted on Tuesday to postpone a vote pertaining to the
future of that major surveillance hub under construction — the
Domain Awareness Center, or DAC — after 79
speakers signed up to rally against the project during the
hearing.

Tuesday's meeting in Oakland ended after more than four hours
with the council agreeing to wait another two weeks before
deciding if they should proceed with plans to use $1.6 million
they’ve been offered by the DHS to proceed with the next stage,
phase 2. The city installed 137 security cameras on the Port of
Oakland, 50 traffic cameras across town and a system of
gunshot-detecting microphones as part of the recently completed
phase 1.